Chapter 2

Grayson stood frozen where he was.

I did as Diana had told me and crept quietly up to the second floor. The moment I pushed open the door, I saw every trace of the life that used to be mine had been eaten away, piece by piece.

I hadn't lost every memory. Some of the good ones still surfaced, faint and distant.

Two months ago, Harper had tossed one of her shopping bags onto my bed without a second thought. I'd carried it back to her room myself, and all I got in return was her bursting into tears, eyes red with self-pity.

Diana had scolded me for it instead. "Sophie, Harper spent ten years out there with no sense of security. That's why she likes to hoard things. How can you be so selfish, making a fuss over something this small?"

From that day on, my room became Harper's second closet.

There was a lamp on my desk, chipped at the corner and pushed out of the way. It was the first thing I'd ever bought with my own money, back when I'd first come home to the Ellisons and worked part-time handing out flyers. Later, Harper decided her own room's lighting wasn't "cozy" enough and set her sights on that lamp of mine.

I wouldn't give it up. While we were pulling it back and forth between us, Grayson happened to come upstairs. Without asking a single question, he snatched the lamp away and smashed it on the floor.

"Sophie, are you out of your mind? You'd make your sister cry over some cheap piece of junk that cost next to nothing? I'll have my assistant buy you a hundred new ones tomorrow. Right now, go apologize to Harper!"

Of course, he never did buy me a new lamp.

I closed my eyes and forced all that bitterness back down where it belonged. It didn't matter anymore. There was nothing left for me to remember now.

I walked into the bathroom and turned the shower on. Ice-cold water poured down over my head. Diana had told me to use the bathroom in my own room, forgetting that its water heater had been broken for a week already. I scrubbed the grime off my skin with the freezing water. Where it hit my cuts, the sting was sharp as a needle, though it was nothing next to the ache underneath it.

I made my way to the corner by the bathroom door and crouched down beside the old cardboard box there.

I don't know how much time passed before the door banged open from outside, someone shoving it in without patience.

"Sophie, how long do you plan on keeping up this..." Grayson's voice, tight with restrained anger, started to ring out, then caught abruptly in his throat. His gaze dropped slowly and landed on the corner where I sat. "What... what are you doing on the floor? Why aren't you sleeping in the bed?"

His voice actually shook.

I flinched hard and scrambled backward. "S-sorry, sir. I didn't know this was your storage room. I shouldn't have come in."

I swallowed and forced my voice down low. He dropped into a crouch and reached for me. "Sophie, get up. The floor's cold."

"Don't hit me!" I curled myself into the corner without meaning to, my voice cracking with fear. "I'll dry off my clothes right away. I won't get the floor dirty. Please, sir, don't hurt me."

He watched me draw into that defensive posture, his eyes landing on my trembling shoulders. He grabbed my shoulder. "Why are your clothes freezing? Your hair's cold too! Did you shower in cold water?"

"I..." I swallowed again, my eyes darting away. "Ma'am said I couldn't use the shared bathroom outside, in case I got the young miss's things dirty. My room, I mean the bathroom off this storage room, doesn't have hot water. I didn't want to smell bad and upset anyone, so I just rinsed off with cold water."

Grayson gulped. Of course he knew the bathroom had no hot water. I'd told him myself a week ago, when the pipe broke. He'd been helping Harper put together some Lego set worth thousands of dollars at the time, and hadn't even looked up.

"You're bothering me over something this small? Sophie, are you picking fights on purpose now that Harper's back, trying to steal attention?"

Nobody had fixed that pipe since.

"I..." Grayson opened his mouth, his voice dry and strained. He looked at my lips, purple from the cold, and reached to pull off his own suit jacket to drape over me.

That was when a light set of footsteps sounded outside the door.

"Grayson? What are you doing in Sophie's room?"